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New
The latest blog posts to take off on Hacker News. 13,066 posts.
Society, Policy & Culture
Any year
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What are the mysterious light sources on light pollution maps?
I got my first telescope in 2017, in time for the Great American Eclipse. I started paying attention to the concept of light pollution, including finding detailed maps of what places had high or lo…
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Moznet IRC is dead; long live Mozilla Matrix
Matrix, the open protocol for secure decentralised communications
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Covid-19 precautions for Stripe employees and customers
Online payment processing for internet businesses. Stripe is a suite of payment APIs that powers commerce for businesses of all sizes
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Google Cloud Next 2020 – in person event cancelled
News and updates on Google Cloud's annual cloud computing conference.
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Adobe Summit Cancelled
Learn about digital trends, gain inspiration and bring the latest intelligence into your business. Explore more now.
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Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves
Q: Answers to Frequently Asked Questions about Tolkien Elves Properly answering the following questions really doesn’t call for long blog posts. So I thought I would publish a simple FAQ-like…
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Economists study what happens when people stop using Facebook
In the most recent issue of the prestigious American Economic Review, a group of well-known economists published a paper titled “The Welfare Effects of Social Media.” It ... Read more
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‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang
Australian Strategic Policy Institute2020255 points106 commentscited by 11Society, Policy & Culture details
‘Re-education’, forced labour and surveillance beyond Xinjiang. What’s the problem? The Chinese government has facilitated the mass transfer of Uyghur and other ethnic minority1 citizens from the far west region of Xinjiang to factories across the country. Under conditions that strongly suggest forced labour, Uyghurs…
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Seeing the Smoke
Information on the coronavirus is widely available, and it doesn’t look positive. So why is everyone waiting for permission to do something about it?
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FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation’s four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers’ location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the fines would be among…
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Your Man in the Public Gallery – Assange Hearing Day Four
Please try this experiment for me. Try asking this question out loud, in a tone of intellectual interest and engagement: “Are you suggesting that the two have the same effect?”. Now try asking this question out loud, in a tone of hostility and incredulity bordering on sarcasm: “Are you suggesting that the two have the…
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A Text Renaissance
There is a renaissance underway in online text as a medium. The Four Horsemen of this emerging Textopia are: Roam , a hypertext publishing platform best…
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Love Zombies? Thank the Public Domain
With more than 3.1 million views to date, “Night of the Living Dead” is among the most popular feature films on the Internet Archive. The 1968 movie is also generally acknowledged as one of the landmark films of the horror genre, as well as the work that single handedly created the modern conception of the
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Assange Hearing Day 3
In yesterday’s proceedings in court, the prosecution adopted arguments so stark and apparently unreasonable I have been fretting on how to write them up in a way that does not seem like caricature or unfair exaggeration on my part. What has been happening in this court has long moved beyond caricature. All I can do […]
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Study of 72,000 COVID-19 patients finds 2.3% death rate
Researchers from China's Center for Disease Control and Prevention today describe the clinical findings on more than 72,000 COVID-19 cases reported in mainland China, which reveal a case-fatality rate (CFR) of 2.3% and suggest most cases are mild, but the disease hits the elderly the hardest.
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DOJ plans to strike against encryption while the Techlash iron is hot
There’s a story in today’s Washington Post “Cybersecurity 202” newsletter that confirms that the Department of Justice is capitalizing on the techlash in order to build up congressional support for the DOJ’s long-desired goal of legislation that will restrict your freedom to encrypt your data and
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A False Economy Powered by Ads and Lies
Tech companies like Facebook, Amazon and Alphabet continue to post record profits despite a slew of controversies and bad press.
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Assange Hearing Day 2
This afternoon Julian’s Spanish lawyer, Baltasar Garzon, left court to return to Madrid. On the way out he naturally stopped to shake hands with his client, proffering his fingers through the narrow slit in the bulletproof glass cage. Assange half stood to take his lawyer’s hand. The two security guards in the cage…
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We need to take CO2 out of the sky – an overview of climate tech
To keep below two degrees, we'll need to dramatically reduce current emissions and simultaneously remove 10-15 gigatons of CO2/yr from the atmosphere by 2050. Read on for what that means, why, and how we might do it.
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Brave Browser and the Wayback Machine: Working Together
The Web just got a little bit more reliable. Available today, starting with version 1.4 of its desktop browser, Brave has added a 404 detection system, with an automated Wayback Machine lookup process to its desktop browser. By default, it now offers users one-click access to archived versions of Web pages that might…
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RFC: Let's Disrupt Dating Apps
This is a new series I’m going to start doing, much in the same spirit as YC’s Request for Startups . RFC doesn’t mean “ Request for Comments ” — although comments are of course welcome — but rather “Request for Co-founder.” RFC posts will be deep-dives on products and problems I find interesting or that I’m…
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Past Time to Tell the Public:It Will Probably Go Pandemic, We Should Prepare Now
by Jody Lanard and Peter M. Sandman NOTE FROM IAN: The expert risk communication team of Lanard and Sandman has given me permission to post their very well-considered reply to my question of them just